Visa watches US chip and pin adoption with new offer

Posted on January 18, 2012.

Visa is hoping that merchant account providers, card issuers and processors will help speed up the adoption of chip payment technologies in the United States following an exemption offer from certain compliance standards. Author: Chris Taylor

Visa is hoping that merchant account providers, card issuers and processors will help speed up the adoption of chip payment technologies in the United States following an exemption offer from certain compliance standards.

Visa is to offer US card merchants the same Technology Innovation Program (TIP) that it has previously offered to European vendors.

TIP prevents the need for merchants to validate their compliance with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCIDSS), providing that three quarters of all their Visa transactions come from chip and pin (or EMV) machines.

Offering TIP to European markets has led to a massive take up in EMV adoption in many European counties, including the UK, reports SC Magazine.

The credit card giant has additionally offered a best practice document about the benefits of EMV. It includes information about how to authenticate EMV transactions through the use of PINs (personal identification numbers), and signatures. It also explains why “always online” EMV purchases are better for authorisation and authentication than the offline systems currently in place in the States.

The adoption of EMV in the US is a very important step towards eliminating card fraud in the country. However, even with EMV, it has been predicted that fraud could move to other channels, like e-commerce.

Despite this, Avivah Litan, a vice president at research firm Gartner says that EMV will be better for merchants when it becomes enforced in the near future.

“Ultimately, beginning in 2016, all industry players, including merchants will benefit from lower card-present fraud and chargeback costs that they currently absorb,” he said in a research paper last year.

“But fraud will undoubtedly migrate to other channels, notably e-commerce, where merchants already pay for the vast majority of fraud and chargeback costs,” the expert added.